Machine Type Communication, also referred to as Machine to Machine (M2M) communications, refers to wireless and wired communications between devices. MTC has a wide range of applications, including industrial automation, logistics, monitoring but also for control purposes.
MTC is widely used for industrial instrumentation applications in which a device, such as a sensor or meter, captures real-time data, such as temperature, inventory level, error reports, surveillance images, etc., and transmits the captured data to a data collection node. In addition to instrumentation, MTC is also being widely adopted for other applications, such as telemetry and automation.
Enabling reliable ultra-low delay machine-type communication (MTC), i.e., Critical-MTC, is an important goal of designers of next generation wireless communications systems.
There are a number of design trade-offs that may be considered in the development of critical MTC application support. These trade-offs include, for example, end-to-end latency, transmission reliability, system capacity and deployment. Moreover, designing a wireless network for critical MTC support requires consideration of various different use cases. Each use case may involve different types of communications, with different bandwidth, latency, and reliability requirements.
For example, in the area of industrial automation, the system may need to accommodate two different classes of messages, namely, messages with ultra-low latency sporadic data (e.g., alert message) and messages with best-effort data (e.g., real-time periodic data).